The issue in life is not how many times we get knocked down. The issue in life is how many times we get back up. And it’s not all that difficult to figure out that if the amount of times we get up is just one less than the amount of times that we’ve been knocked down, then we’re spending our lives lying down. Life will knock us down; guaranteed.
Knocked Down as a Correlation to Living
Figuring out how robustly we’re living life is really rather rudimentary. All we have to do is look at the number of times we get knocked down. The fact is, the number of times that we’re knocked flat is in direct correlation to how aggressively we’re pressing into life. If we’re running head-long into life, life is going to run head-long into us. So if we’re not getting knocked down, it’s likely because we’re not going anywhere to get knocked down.
The Dance of Avoidance – Keeping Us Down
There’s a whole lot of people doing a whole lot of dancing. The intent of the dance is to skirt around whatever the things are that are likely to knock us down. A little dancing in the right place at the right times for the right reasons certainly has value. Yet, too often this dancing is not about effective navigation as much as it’s about all-out avoidance. Most often than not we’re doing nothing more than dancing in place and therefore we’re not going any place.
Denial – Keeping Us Down
When life collides with us with an impact that lays us flat on our backs, we’re often in denial that any of that’s happened at all. We can be down for the count and think that we’re up for the challenge. We can find ourselves dead in our tracks and think that we’re making tracks. We can believe that we’re out there pressing into this thing that we call life when the only thing that we’re pressing into is the armchair that we’ve parked ourselves in.
Hit Me – Refusing to Stay Down
If life’s not hitting me, it’s because I’m not hitting life. The calm in the storm might be due to the fact that I’ve not even entered the storm. Even for those of us who relentlessly forge ahead, we will have calm days. But, calm for too longs begs the question of whether we’re in an all-out pursuit of life, or we’re all-out of the pursuit of life.
I want to press into life. When my life is over, I want to make absolutely certain that what I’ve left behind me is immeasurably greater than what I’ve left in front of me. And to end up somewhere near the end of that kind of road will mean that I’m going to get hit along the way. I’m not all that interested in inviting the blows that life will wield, and I have no intent of egging life on. But I’m not going to run from those blows either. And so I’d rather be hit because that means I’m headed somewhere verses being lost in the ‘nowhere’ that dancing and denial will plant me.
Hit Me – Getting Up
When I’m hit, I’m going to get up. I’m going to get up, because to not get up is to end the journey of my life right in the exact place where I got knocked down. To not get up is to say that whatever knocked me down is bigger than my ability to get back up. To not get up is to say that life has the ability to beat me decades before the grave brings it all to a close. And so, I refuse not to get back up.
The main thing that gets us up is the conviction that we’re not going to stay down regardless of what put us down, or what might put us down the next time. It’s a commitment to always being on our feet, and to getting back on our feet should we find ourselves somewhere else other than our feet. We need to get up because anything less is less than what we can live with. The issue in life is not how many times we get knocked down. The issue in life is how many times we get back up. So, let’s get up and let’s get going.
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC